Sports Biblio Digest 8.12.18: A Decaying Steel Town’s Salvation, Or Not?
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also In This Issue: Baseball Economics in the Roaring Twenties; Nick Saban Beyond the Scowl; Bob Cousy at 90; Diamond Jubilee for the All-American Girls; Cuba’s Serie Nacional; A College Football Announcer’s ‘Generous Heart;’ Remembering Stan Mikita
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How much can a sport, any sport, give a rundown small town enough pride not just to hold on, but to try to bounce back?
High school football has often provided a backdrop for exploring such questions, from the plains of West Texas, to the cotton fields of South Georgia and especially the coal mines and steel mills of Western Pennsylvania.
The latter has produced some of the great names of the game, especially quarterbacks: Joe Namath, Joe Montana, Dan Marino, Jim Kelly, George Blanda and Johnny Unitas.
Of all those small towns, none may resonate with high school football tradition more than Aliquippa, Pa., home to long-ago NFL standouts Mike Ditka and Tony Dorsett and more recently, Tyrone Law, Sean Gilbert and Darrelle Revis.
All but Dorsett played for the Quips of Aliquippa High School, the subject of S.L. Price’s 2016 book “Playing Through the Whistle: Steel, Football and an American Town” (Atlantic Monthly Press).
While the Sports Illustrated writer examines the Quips’ lauded history—one that includes Press Maravich, later a basketball coach and father of Pete Maravich—it’s Aliquippa the town, and its shriveled-up, crime- and drug-plagued present, that’s at the heart of an unrelentingly dismal story.
In 2012, Rich Cohen’s article in The New Republic, “A Journey to the End of Football,” referenced Aliquippa as a classic example of how a sport is so inextricably defined by a town:
“It might be the bleakest place I’ve ever been. Once the booming home of J & L Steel, it began its decline when the mill closed in the 1980s. Just about every store on Main Street is boarded. The people who remain appear trapped. The high school is on a hill above town. The football field is in a valley below, ratty, rocky, surrounded by row houses built for workers who died a generation ago. In such places, it can seem people have just one thing to offer: their bodies, which they fed to the factories and feed to the game.
“What happens to such a place when the world changes? When an economy, which had been about bodies and brains, gives way to an economy about brains alone? In Aliquippa, you realize that the violence of the sport is not something that evolved but was one point of the game from the beginning, the hitting being a cure for every kind of mood, the way, when you are so low you have to reach up to touch bottom, nothing beats getting drunk, going to town, and picking a fight with a man twice your size.”
After reading Price’s book, a reader will wonder why anyone stays there at all. Absorbing the declarations of the Trump constituency about staying rooted to a place and a sense of community, even one that’s in grand decline, is to still shake one’s head about Aliquippa.
While there’s plenty of pride about what the Quips accomplished on the field over so many decades, family members of some of their gridiron heroes got caught up in crime, drugs and utter despair. (In 2011, Dorsett's nephew was given a 30-year sentence for drug dealing. The son of ex-Quip lineman Jeff Baldwin is serving 40 years for murdering a police officer.)
Once upon a time in Aliquippa, Price writes, “sport is where the melt in the pot began,” as the workers and sons of workers at the J & L plant took to the playing fields embodied by American melting pot ideal. They were mostly of Irish, Italian and Slavic stock, when the teams were still all-white.
The harshness of owner-labor relations at J & L was parroted with the Quips, who had their share of hard-ass coaches who cared little about the well-being of their players.
Future coaches were more generous and empathetic, especially as the social and cultural fabric of the community began to erode. Price weaves in detailed, learned history and economics in showing how the American steel industry came undone in the 1950s.
Over the next two decades, that economic collapse played itself out in devastating fashion in Aliquippa.
As the 1960s rolled around, ironically as the Quips’ greatest seasons were about to unfold, that social glue began to loosen. First it was racial tensions that boiled over. After J & L closed up, other pathologies soon took over, and virtually anyone not economically well-off enough to leave was vulnerable to its corrosive effects. Said current Quips coach Mike Zmijanac:
“In 1970, ‘71, ‘72, you didn’t want to go to Aliquippa. It was a terrible place to go to school.”
The problems grew rapidly worse, as the population dropped from a peak of 30,000 during the height of the industrial years to 13,000 in the mid-1980s.
Aliquippians derived local pride from the rise of Mike Ditka as the Chicago Bears head coach. But like many Aliquippians who became famous elsewhere, including the late composer Henry Mancini, he hasn’t come back. Price writes:
“Now in demise, labor itself, dirty and dangerous and boring, stood revealed as the last defense. When the work crumbled, all hell broke loose.”
His descriptions of narcotics addictions and savage murders are gut-wrenching to read. Revis, whose 13-year NFL career just ended, talked about how several childhood friends had been murdered.
After more than 500 pages of such gloomy realities, Price retains some optimism that football can salvage something of at least some people who are talented and dedicated enough to try to get out. The Quips’ success in the 1980s influenced that sense:
“This is what is left. Football is the endgame, the gritty final distillation of the dream that our great-grandfathers came here to dream, the one systematic and proven process that can result in a scholarship, a way out for the next generation, maybe big money."
That will be only for a tiny few. What ails Aliquippa, and especially other Rust Belt enclaves where Trump prevailed, can’t be healed by just having more football stars make it to the pros. Or by bringing back mines, mills and factories. Or imposing tariffs.
Price spends much time chronicling the general decay of a town that needs so much more than a good team to cheer for on Friday nights. He admits the town still has a hold on him, "a small world, still alive, still proud, still dying."
But a narrative with an understandable appeal to hopefulness and redemption also tends to mask the economic, educational, criminal and social ills of places that elite America continues to misunderstand, and underestimate.
Editor’s Note: This is the second installment of a series to lead the newsletter in August called the “Football Bookshelf.” Here’s last week’s first post. Future subjects include biographies of Brett Favre and Terry Bradshaw and pigskin politics.
A Few Good Reads
At ESPN.com, Keith Van Valkenberg on what makes Nick Saban really tick, as Alabama gears up for another season of likely dominance in college football, and why his famous scowl hardly describes the man;
Bob Cousy just turned 90, and is still living in Worcester, Mass., trying to get by as anonymously as possible while reading a couple of books a week, many of them about politics, government and history. He’ll be featured in Gary Pomerantz’ “The Last Pass: Cousy, Russell, the Celtics and What Matters in the End,” to be published by Penguin Press in October;
From Victory Journal, sobering changes to Cuba’s Serie Nacional baseball league, for cost and other considerations; what began in 1961 has few reminders today, other than decaying ballparks, a few aging stars, and the fans who still live and die with their provincial team and whose towns still can be temporarily reshaped by a deep playoff run;”
The New York-Penn baseball league was founded in Batavia, N.Y., and long has had a community-run team, the Muckdogs, who may be disappearing thanks to changing priorities for the Class A minor-league circuit that abandoned many of its traditional places;
Very cool: The Baseball Hall of Fame has digitized many yearbook, program and score book covers and related materials from the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which is marking its 75th anniversary this weekend, including honors at Yankee Stadium;
In August 1988, Keith Reinhard, a sportswriter for The Daily Herald in suburban Chicago, disappeared on a Colorado mountain-climbing trip and hasn’t been seen since. His son has just scaled the same slope overlooking an old mining town, and a documentary filmmaker is at work on a project about the mystery, which continues to perpetuate many competing theories;
From Mundial magazine, former Liverpool bad boy Craig Bellamy and his search for Welsh masculinity;
A USC football announcer makes some of his most important calls for people who will never know him, in some of the last words they will ever hear; wonderful work from Bill Plaschke at the Los Angeles Times.
Sports Book News
At U.S. Sport History, Bob D’Angelo reviews “The Age of Ruth and Landis: The Economics of Baseball During the Roaring Twenties,” which was published in June by the University of Nebraska Press. He writes that while it’s got plenty of financial statistics, the book is “a readable examination of an explosive period of growth — on the field and in the box office — in major league baseball;”
Coming next spring: Doubleday will publish a new book by Tyler Kepner, baseball columnist for The New York Times, entitled “K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches,” which combines interviews with archival research.
Passings
Stan Mikita, 78, was as synonymous with the golden age of the Chicago Blackhawks as teammate Bobby Hull. The Czech-born Canadian immigrant introduced the curved stick into the NHL and went from being a brawling young star to a revered gentleman on and off the ice.
Mikita, Chicago’s all-time leading scorer and a Hockey Hall of Famer, was diagnosed with Lewy Body dementia in 2015. He spent his entire 22-year career with the Blackhawks, striking up close friendships with the city’s other sports icons, including Mike Ditka, and was involved in many charitable endeavors in Chicago in retirement.
It was a question from his toddler daughter that got him to change his fighting ways, as she wondered why he was spending so much time alone in the penalty box.
Retired Chicago sportswriter Bob Verdi, the Blackhawks’ official team historian, wrote this week that Mikita was “a complete professional, meticulous and caring and genuine. He was an ambassador for the Blackhawks 50 years before they hired him as such and gave him the title. He was all about the hockey game, not the fame game.”
A public visitation is being held Sunday at the United Center in Chicago for Mikita, who will lie in state. On Saturday he was honored by the Cubs at Wrigley Field with a moment of silence.
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The Sports Biblio Digest is an e-mail newsletter delivered each Sunday. You can subscribe here and search the archives.
This is Digest issue No. 135, published Aug. 12, 2018.
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